Plos One
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Many consumers use natural health products (NHPs) concurrently with prescription medications. As NHP-related harms are under-reported through passive surveillance, the safety of concurrent NHP-drug use remains unknown. To conduct active surveillance in participating community pharmacies to identify adverse events related to concurrent NHP-prescription drug use. ⋯ Active surveillance markedly improves identification and reporting of adverse events associated with concurrent NHP-drug use. Although not without challenges, active surveillance is feasible and can generate adverse event data of sufficient quality to allow for meaningful adjudication to assess potential harms.
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Randomized Controlled Trial Clinical Trial
No effect of a single session of transcranial direct current stimulation on experimentally induced pain in patients with chronic low back pain--an exploratory study.
Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has been shown to modulate cortical excitability. A small number of studies suggested that tDCS modulates the response to experimental pain paradigms. No trials have been conducted to evaluate the response of patients already suffering from pain, to an additional experimental pain before and after tDCS. ⋯ Modalities of quantitative sensory testing remained equally unchanged. It is therefore hypothesized that a single 15 mins session of tDCS at 1 mA may not be sufficient to alter the perception of experimental pain and in patients with chronic pain. Further studies applying repetitive tDCS to patients with chronic pain are required to fully answer the question whether experimental pain perception may be influenced by tDCS over the motor cortex.
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There has been no consensus on the optimal treatment of symptomatic sacral perineural cysts. Most previous reports concerning the management methods were either sporadic case reports or a series of limited cases. This study is to further optimize the management for patients with symptomatic sacral perineural cysts by analyzing the outcomes of a cohort of patients who were treated with different strategies. ⋯ Microsurgical operation should be a treatment consideration in patients with symptomatic sacral perineural cysts. Furthermore, the surgical procedure with partial cyst removal and aperture repair for prevention of cerebrospinal fluid leakage seemed to be more simple and effective.
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In addition to clinical aspects and pathogen characteristics, people's health-related behavior and socioeconomic conditions can affect the occurrence and severity of diseases including influenza A(H1N1)pdm09. ⋯ Health-care-seeking behavior, poverty level, and the distribution of information affect the occurrence and severity of pneumonia due to H1N1 virus from a socioeconomic point of view. These socioeconomic factors may explain the different patterns of morbidity and mortality for H1N1 influenza observed among different countries and regions.
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Early gestation represents a period of vulnerability to environmental insult that has been associated with adult psychiatric disease. However, little is known about how prenatal perturbation translates into adult brain dysfunction. Here, we use a longitudinal study design to examine the effects of disruption of early gestational neurogenesis on brain volume in the non-human primate. ⋯ Due to the small number of observations, the conclusions drawn from this study must be viewed as tentative. Early gestational irradiation may result in non-uniform reduction of gray matter, mainly affecting the putamen and cerebral cortex. This may be relevant to understanding how early prenatal environmental insult could lead to brain morphological differences in neurodevelopmental diseases.